The impact on my commute from this weekend’s freeway collapse was relatively minor. I was expecting the boat to be totally packed– and it may have been on the 8:20 run. It was about 70% full with only the passengers from Alameda, they had sent a separate boat for Oakland. Both are shown docked here– quite the busy morning.

Perhaps I can get a nicer shot of the boats & long lines this evening on my way home, I was constricted pretty heavily by the direction and intensity of the sunlight–And only about 2 minutes before the Peralta pulled away. But managed to get one good shot out of the mix.

Also, if anyone is trying to work out exactly where the collapse is (so you can route around it), here’s a handy map.

Just pointing out that I’ve actually started to post content onto the Alameda Project site, and that I think the pictures are better than the words.  I’ll be editing and expanding posts as I see fit.

Also, the fountain picture from there is available as a desktop on the desktop page.

We had this fun shoot in a stairwell back in March. I was going back through the images, I realized I had shot a “how I did it series”.

I had no idea where the shoot was going to happen when I showed up. I had two flashes, pocket wizards, and some light stands. They wanted to start in the stairwell, and move to the rooftop. I had a few minutes to play before the dancers showed up, so I decided to concentrate on this little section of stairwell, and trying to light them pretty evenly with soft light, and keep the flashes on low enough power they would recycle fast enough to just keep shooting.

Here’s the light at the bottom, bouncing off the big white wall:

And the upper one:

The two lights were dialed down to about 1/4 power, so they were still putting out a lot of light, but I was able to keep going. It worked out pretty well, we got about 70 shots in the stairwell in 8 minutes, then 4 minutes later we were ready to go on the rooftop for another 15 shots in about 10 minutes. The slower shooting rooftop was mainly because of the long exposure needed to capture the sky detail. Here’s a shot at the same shutter speed I was using in the hallway:

And this whole shoot was fast. I was told we had 30 minutes start to finish, and we needed to do both locations. I did scouting & setup in about 5 minutes, and the rest of the shoot took 18 minutes start to finish. By comparison, the Josh Klipp shoot, was 10 minutes of setup, and 35 minutes of shooting in one location that had already been scouted. All in all, this kind of work is really fun, even working so fast.

Warehouse District

Originally uploaded by blp1979.

Last weekend I was in Kansas City for a friend’s wedding. Had a chance the day before the wedding to drive around aimlessly looking for interesting things to photograph.

You can see the whole set on Flickr, along with my commentary.

KCMO is a great town, with a surprising lot to offer. As the groom, from Kansas City, said: “I wanted to make sure everyone knew you could fly into Kansas City, not just over Kansas City.”

Hey, I realized I had completely forgotten to blog the actual photo from the previous quilt shoot.

This is the very lovely & amazing quilt by Susan Fuller of EBHQ. I believe it is 45″ square or 48″ square.

More on the process here.

And the video/photo was featured on strobist.com.

I’ve rented the Nikon 35-70mm f/2.8 (on the recommendation of someone to this post) to play with for the weekend.  It’s working pretty well, except I cannot get it to focus further away than about 8 feet.  That is, when it is dialed to infinity, things 8 feet away are in focus.

Given what I’m up to this weekend, that won’t be a problem.  The rental shop doesn’t open until 9, so I can’t call them just yet.  I checked my first hunch, a close focus lens on the front of the lens, but it wasn’t that.

Manual focus or auto focus, it hits its end stop before it comes anywhere near to focussed.

Neat, upgraded to WP 2.1.3.  It was painless.

Water Test

Originally uploaded by blp1979.

Also available on the Desktops page. However, I just wanted to point out that I was in fact up to my shins in the SF Bay. Temperature in the bay is apparently holding steady at around 60F, so it wasn’t as bad as I had feared.

A fun shot, about 20 minutes after sunset. The fisherman was just there. Camera was maybe 10″ above the water level. I’m not sure how I feel about the posterization at the bottom, but I’m not sure how to improve that.

I live in this great little place called Alameda, California. We’re an island. We weren’t always an island, but some enterprising folks thought it would be nice if Oakland had a deep water port, so at the turn of the 20th century, they dredged out some marshland to completely separate Alameda from Oakland. …

Read more on the Alameda Project Site

I just moved the whole thing onto its own blog. The site look and content is still getting dialed in.

Okay, identify these three items, which are all in my office (click for larger):

No prize, just mention =) Winners will be judged on correctness, and depth of guess (i.e., model #, brand name, etc. gets you more points). Place your guesses in comments below, comments will be held in moderation so you can’t peek.